BENGALURU: Videos have become the most preferred mode of information consumption driving over 75 per cent of the internet traffic. Organisations are increasingly using videos for various informational purposes such as education of students, training of customers, partners and employees, marketing and internal communication. However, most viewers do not have the patience to watch these videos end-to-end.
The Bengaluru-based startup VideoKen uses artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically index videos in the form of a table-of-contents, a phrase cloud, and a searchable transcript, which helps summarize the key topics in a video and lets viewers navigate directly to the topics of interest. VideoKen was founded in 2017 by the trio — computer scientist Manish Gupta, who is currently heading Google’s AI research lab in Bengaluru, along with Ashish Vikram, who is an ex-VP of Engineering at Flipkart and Vishnu Raned, who is an ex- regional VP Asia Pacific & Japan at Zend Technologies. Theybought the IP rights of this unique product from Xerox labs and worked on it further to offer a service to its clients ranging from tech companies like TCS to IIT Kharagpur.
According to Gupta, who is also a faculty member at the International Institute of Information Technology -Bengaluru (IIIT-B), the company is also focussed on helping content service providers and marketing agencies understand the viewing behaviour by informing them the most watched topics covered in the video , which could help them improve their services as well as drive more traffic, besides making videos more consumable.There is no Indian company which offers such solutions to the enterprises.
Gupta said that VideoKen is also in talks with some of the companies in the United States for providing its services. “Our clientele base is in the US predominantly. We are also in talks with several other companies for more tie-ups. There are technically no key Indian players which are offering such solutions to businesses here. We have acquired the patent rights from US for this technology,” Gupta said.